Skipper Mark spraying us all with champagne after we docked just past dawn in Santa Cruz (I'm kneeling next to him, covering my face with my hood)
Bit by bit we slowly chipped away at Nova Scotia's lead until we trailed them by a few hundred yards as we entered Monteray Bay at 2:00 a.m. Having been flying along at 13 kts most of the night, the winds dropped down to a whisper in the shadow of the 3000ft mountains surrounding us.
It took us three hours to finish off those last five miles, passing Nova Scotia only at the very end. They'd chosen to hoist a lightweight spinnaker in the ghost-like breezes but we went with a more manageable ultra lightweight headsail known as a windseeker. Their spinnaker hung like a limp sock under it's own weight. We all sat with our butts on the toerail on the leeward (downwind) side, causing our own limp sail to at least fall into a curve that resembled an aerodynamic shape. That was all the difference we needed to crawl past them eight tenths of a mile from the buoy marking the finish line.
We'd raced 2080 nautical miles and it came down to yards.
I'm exhausted and I've been up for 30 straight hours but it's hard to get to sleep. We've been given a free day to spend simply relaxing and enjoying our moment before we begin the usual two day deep clean and repair tomorrow.
Between the food and the drinks everyone's buying everyone else (I've had three and passed on the following six offered), I've also managed to pull together a video of the final 24 hours.
